Thinking about Thinking: Implications for Patient Safety

Thinking about thinking: implications for patient safety.

Clinical medicine, a learned, rational, science-using practice, is labelled a science even though physicians have the good sense not to practise it that way. Rather than thinking like scientists - or how we think scientists think - physicians are engaged in analogical, interpretive reasoning that resembles Aristotle's phronesis, or practical reasoning, more closely than episteme, or scientific ...

Dimensions for Thinking About Thinking

We start by making a distinction between mind and cognition, and by positing that cognition is an aspect of mind. We propose as a working hypothesis a Separability Hypothesis which posits that we can factor off an architecture for cognition from a more general architecture for mind, thus avoiding a number of philosophical objections that have been raised about the "Strong AI" hypothesis. We the...

Thinking slow about thinking fast

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman attributes experientially-learned real-world coping skills to an " associative machine " acting on declarative memories of facts and events. While this attribution is probably correct for the unfamiliar types of situations that are the subject of his famous experiments conducted with Amos Tversky, we argue that experientially-learned real-wo...

Critical Thinking about 'critical Thinking'

Computational thinking and thinking about computing

Computational thinking will influence everyone in every field of endeavour. This vision poses a new educational challenge for our society, especially for our children. In thinking about computing, we need to be attuned to the three drivers of our field: science, technology and society. Accelerating technological advances and monumental societal demands force us to revisit the most basic scienti...